Melbourne man tried suicide by cop: court

With his girlfriend bleeding from the gash he carved into her throat and bearing bullet wounds from a failed attempt at "suicide by police", a Melbourne man barricaded his home and began reheating Chinese food.

Police forced their way into Sammy Portelli's home and found him unconscious in his kitchen with three knives stashed down his pants, and his partner near death on the floor.

The woman was raced to hospital having lost two litres of blood.

Portelli, 47, was on a cocktail of ice and anti-depression pills when he slashed his girlfriend's throat with a razor blade in their St Albans apartment last November.

When she continued to fight, he tried to smother her with a pillow then hacked at her throat with a knife.

The attack only stopped when, resigned to death, the woman asked Portelli to cuddle her because she didn't want to die alone.

"She had resigned herself to the fact she was going to die," prosecutor Susan Borg told the Victorian Supreme Court on Thursday.